A Serious Narrative Form?

A video game would not be a video game without visuals and design. But arguably it wouldn't be much fun without a point--or something to do--whether it be a story, a goal, or at least an environment to walk around in. There's a great deal of discussion in game theory academic circles about the importance of story and narrative in games. In the summer 2004 issue of The Paris Review literary magazine, the renowned Japanese author Haruki Murakami, in an interview, says, "I think video games are closer to fiction than anything else these days." The interviewer responds, "Video games?" with transparent surprise and bewilderment. Murakami then explains that he doesn’t play video games, but feels the similarity. "Sometimes while I'm writing I feel I'm the designer of a video game, and at the same time a player. I made up the program, and now I'm in the middle of it; the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. It's a kind of detachment. A feeling of a split." Murakami is a traditional pen and paper writer. He works at his kitchen table and is not, as his fans know, in any way part of the so-called digital revolution. His awareness of the role of narrative in video games is instinctual, not studied. Murakami's comment may be interpreted as a sign that video games are becoming more influential than we possibly know. But does story affect technology, or does the technology affect the story?

Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.

In 1998, the MIT Press published Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, which argues that technology affects the way stories are told. Games--like comic books and, at one point, television, radio, and the Internet--have suffered from the awkward transition from one medium to the next as new vehicles for our stories emerge. Naturally, all forms can and do coexist, but some are more widely accepted than others.

To Murray, dismissing games as well as comics because they are enjoyed by and are accessible to a broad, relatively mainstream audience is a narrow viewpoint. "I think comic books and games are similar in that they have a strong popular face. They are an accessible mass cultural form, and they also afford an enormous range of expressions," she says, adding that games, like comics, have artistic tradition as well as entertainment tradition. "I think all strong expressive traditions grow out of wide practice."

People have learned to take the games industry, if not games themselves, somewhat more seriously thanks to the business's well-publicized, multibillion dollar annual sales figures. But the public seems farther away from appreciating games as a credible source of stories, although it could happen. Murray says the interactive nature of games adds dimension to stories. "I think it's as if we knew how to make paintings, and now we make sculptures. We now have a way of telling stories procedurally, so now we can tell stories that aren't unisequential (those that don't have one sequence to them) but are multisequential. And, also, we can tell stories that are multiform--that the same story elements can be combined in different ways." Murray calls this method native to the human mind but adds that we haven't had a medium to reflect this way of thinking before.

R.A. Montgomery’s Journey Under the Sea Choose Your Own Adventure.

Before digital entertainment, efforts had been made to make text more dimensional. In the 1970s, R.A. Montgomery and Edward Packard published a series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure. These young-audience books were specifically designed to let the reader control how the story should progress. At the end of each page, the reader was given two or more choices that would propel the story's action forward. He or she then turned to the page that corresponded to whatever choice was made, and the story continued. While they may be remembered fondly for the nostalgia factor, Mateas says these books were basically a failure because of the way the stories were built--on a branching structure of finite choices. "One of my strong beliefs in thinking about the future of interactive story," says Mateas, "is that no technique based on a graph, where you can essentially draw out all the possible paths (and, of course, Choose Your Own Adventure is an example of this), no method like that will move us to the future of interactive fiction or interactive narrative." This would present a proverbial dead end, it seems.

Finite choices in finite numbers of rooms or environments with finite numbers of weapons or enemies are basic tenets of commercial game design today. But certain trends in games show that designers are beginning to break out of that box. Albeit the best efforts, such as Grand Theft Auto, still have a long way to go from scripted choice points--even though players are pretty much offered a free range of movement. The flip side, Mateas says, is that when you play around in a huge, open world like GTA, there is no story structure. "So you just sort of wander aimlessly and crash cars aimlessly--to the extent where they did put story structure into the game in that you can choose to do the missions. If you do the missions, you're back in this sort of tightly scripted situation," Mateas argues. Peter Molyneux's Black & White is a similar example. The player is offered freedom of movement, but to make things happen in the game, structure is reintroduced--and then along come the scripted decisions again.

"There's this tension to create these big, open spaces where the player can do whatever he wants," Mateas suggests, "but nothing happens over time. You wander and wander and wander and wander, and five hours later, you're still watching, but nothing's progressed. And the only way that game designers, as a community, know how to do progression is to basically enforce it with these quasi-linear scripts. We have to get out of that box and create something that has progression but that still has a lot of the openness of open-ended worlds. That's the focus of games like Façade and some of the games in the Experimental Games Lab. That's one of my big priority items to work on--to try to figure out how to do that."

Façade puts you in the midst of a soap opera of sorts.

Don't expect to find the Experimental Games Lab's interactive drama Façade at the local Electronics Boutique anytime soon, but to Mateas, components that make up a good novel, such as rich characters and a rich story, are signs of an intelligent game. And Façade is one of his serious efforts to this end. "I think that achieving this kind of drama is going to require fundamental advances in AI technology," Mateas says. He, along with Andrew Stern, has been working on the Façade project. In Façade, the player acts as a third party at a get-together over drinks with a married couple. The player becomes involved in the couple's marital troubles as the plot unfurls. But the game is not all story-based. Mateas reports that Façade actively includes some aspects of gameplay that are traditionally associated with real-time games. As a result, you can move around, it's 3D, and you can do whatever you want when you want. "We were trying to bring in real-time, simulation-world aspects of games and combine that with interactive story and characters," Mateas says. "I think if experiences like Façade are successful--if they work as player experiences--the game industry would happily, sort of, heap them up under the umbrella of gaming."